Summer: Why I Love the Mendocino Triple Junction
(California beginnings, one of many)
-written after a 7.2 north coast quake, june 2005 notebook.
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“I’ll have the Mendocino Triple Junction, please.” I know, it sounds like a banana split.
Or a fantastic train ride where the conductor calls out “Mendocinooo Triple-juncshunnn! All aboard!”
If the Triple Junction doesn’t kill you, it is somewhat like a banana split, or a train ride through time.
The Mendocino Triple Junction is the conjunction of three great tectonic plates, and it’s out there, I tell you, it’s real.
Now the Junction is off the coast about twenty miles, I think. Picture the most lonesome coastline of the sea you can think of, with high, bare coastal bluffs of rock, nothing but a few cows walking down the roadside of a two-lane highway twisting through its lonely pass and descending steeply to the sea and you’re there- at a place called Cape Mendocino. It is the part of California that stretches out to the Pacific furthest, the westernmost point, and standing there, alone, the wind messin’ up your hair, the cows walking by, and the sea like ruffled slate endlessly before you: You are looking out over the Triple Junction.
Thank you, scientists and mariners who figured this out, this whole San Andreas Shebang. I find it fascinating.
Last night we in California heard the Junction’s call: an earthquake, ninety miles out to sea, measuring seven point two magnitude, I think.
The Mendocino Triple Junction is comprised of three great ancient tectonic plates. Children, gather ‘round and repeat: North American, Gordo, and Pacific.
The big old Pacific one is under the sea, and bumping and grinding along the North American Plate to its east, it embraces and is doing a wild disco dance with the Gordo Plate in between. This sort of shocking ménage a trois got extra boisterous last evening about eight pm, and nearly caused a tsunami, but we were spared.
It was a horizontal movement of the plates, and so didn’t rock the water to create a massive wave. It did rock Crescent City though, and Eureka, and Arcata, I’m sure. These delightful little California towns are the last you come to as you approach the Oregon border, ‘way up there. They front the sea, in a haze of cool fog, with giant redwoods climbing remote mountains in the rear. A historic lighthouse at Crescent City holds its lonely vigil, while beneath the Pacific Ocean the great earth process creates and destroys and creates, like a heartbeat, over millennia.
Eureka has its old, stacked Victorian mansions, and Arcata its town square plaza and vegan breakfast menu. My wait person worked with horses and took classes at Humboldt State, the time I was there. And in the redwood forest a few miles to the left of my sunny omelet, and a few miles northward, one could see Roosevelt elk in the gravelly riverbed, and trees two thousand years old. Bump, grind, the earth dance goes on underneath it all. Erotic Earth, thank you, for creating this continent, and allowing this continental breakfast on dry land.
All this because of the Junction, the Mendocino Triple Junction!
Tectonic plates brought the sea floor to us and heaved it up as a gift of land studded with miraculous fossils; the sea floor overlooks San Francisco and is now its crowning hills waving with tall grass, cars wending by on twisty roads past wisps of sea fog. Tectonic plates in collision and subduction, ramming and jamming crust beneath, hauling up land in new combinations of mushed up rock, much of it dragged from far away in the Southern Hemisphere, and much of it 150 million years old. Big old scoops of delicious Franciscan Melange scraped along to grab every morsel and add to the continent, or to place on the continental shelf for later.
It’s delicious. If I have my facts straight, the old Farallon Plate was finally smashed up against our shore, and over eons it was subducted, thrust beneath the continent in an eastward movement against the unmoving western boundary of North America. When that old Farallon Plate was finally completely crushed, 28 million years ago (correct me if I’m wrong) the east/west tension of tectonic plates was compromised, and the plates began to trend north, creating the present San Andreas Fault; that web of fractures seen from above looks like a valley, all green and peaceful. But watch out, kids. The San Andreas has many moods.
So the Pacific Plate slides along the North American Plate, and carries northward landforms which became our home, sweet liberal Northern California, all hot tubs and peacock feathers. It took mountains from Big Sur and planted them north of me, at Point Reyes, against which our Spanish merchant explorers ran aground hundreds of years ago. Our beautiful coastline the Spanish would curse as they sailed by, because the Junction was bringing forth high mountains that rose right out of the sea, and those were covered with fog, and no place to land, no food, and no refueling station. California was saving itself for the right time, obviously, and though every town has a Spanish name, the relationship was somewhat strained. Why? It comes down to the Mendocino Triple Junction, and those plates creating California exactly the way it is meant to be, without regard for Man.
But wait, look at the array of lights, out over the San Francisco hills, across the bay at night, and far, far beyond low lying hills, into the heart of Northern California, Land of Gold. The fact that half of it is heading for Alaska shouldn’t disturb me right now. It’s beautiful, and it will still be beautiful when we’re gone.
How do I know this? Because the whole thing, I’ve learned, is recycling itself. It’s a big old Ce-ment Mixer, creating new gunk and churning down the old- nuclear plants and all. Trees and rock and everything.
And the “Ce-ment Mixer” is the new tectonic dance going on at the Junction. You can’t see it out there beneath the sea, but last night we heard about it.
A big sexy earthquake with a magnitude of seven: in terms of earth, that is heaven. For that’s creating the continents, a sign of Earth’s dynamic life. I know- run for your lives. Head for higher ground.
But without the Triple Junction at the end of my home fault, which starts down here at Frisco, and ends up there near Eureka, without all that, there would be no higher ground. Things around here would be mighty flat, and mighty wet. And at best, we’d have have fins and talk with bubbles, or sing with the whales.
So I love to stand at the remote, beautiful, lonesome rocky shore of Cape Mendocino, out in the middle of nowhere, with a few cows walking by, and look out over the great Pacific, and think of how, out on the horizon, and down below, the Mendocino Triple Junction is chugging right along.
We regard the Triple Junction with ease. We lean and loaf in California, like old Walt Whitman, at our ease, part of the Fault, the Junction, as relaxed as if we waited for a train, and thought, let’s have a triple scoop with sprinkles.
We’ll prepare for the next one.
7/15/05
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